Re: Every sufficiently competent C programmer knows --- Very Stupid Mistake

On 3/11/2025 9:41 PM, Richard Heathfield wrote:

On 12/03/2025 01:22, olcott wrote:

DDD correctly simulated by HHH never reaches its
own "return" instruction and terminates normally
in any finite or infinite number of correctly
simulated steps.

 If it correctly simulates infinitely many steps, it doesn't terminate. Look up "infinite".
 But your task is to decide for /any/ program, not just DDD. That, as you are so fond of saying, is 'stipulated', and you can't get out of it. The whole point of the Entscheidungsproblem is its universality. Ignore that, and you have nothing.
 

Given that his code has HHH(DD) returning 0, resulting in DD halting when run, he's claiming that HHH(DD)==0 is actually the right answer.
When he says "DDD correctly simulated by HHH" that's code for "replacing the code of HHH with an unconditional simulator and subsequently running HHH(DD)", and that's the question that his HHH is actually attempting to answer, not the halting question.
He doesn't understand that while his criteria is basically the same as the halting criteria, given HHH(X) where X doesn't include a call to HHH, it is not the same in cases where X does include a call to HHH, as DD does.  His criteria changes the input in that case, but he doesn't get it.